Amina Claudine Myers

Nominally a jazz pianist, Amina Claudine Myers is actually one of the great living synthesists of Black American music, her work on the piano and organ and as an improvising vocalist bridging blues, the gospel, and, yes, jazz in a singular but flexible vision. Born in rural Arkansas northwest of Little Rock, Myers directed gospel quartets and choirs as a kid before splitting for Chicago, becoming a schoolteacher, attending Roosevelt University, and, all importantly, enlisting in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians shortly after Muhal Richard Abrams founded it. She played with the likes of Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons, predecessors whose stylistic limitations highlighted the liberation that AACM offered. “He stopped—put both of his arms on either side of my Hammond organ—and said, ‘You ain’t playing the blues, Claude,’” she once recalled of her time with Ammons. “Times like this made me realize how I truly wanted to do my own thing.”

She has done her own thing for nearly half a century. Alongside her work with Henry Threadgill, Art Ensemble of Chicago, and, essentially, Wadada Leo Smith, Myers has made a series of solo records that have tested perceptions of spiritual and secular music, of composition and improvisation, of what it means to have the blues and attempt to push them aside. Abiding by the principle “ancient to the future,” her stunning 2025 masterpiece, Solace of the Mind, distilled tunes from her past—“African Blues,” “Song for Mother E,” the spiritual she detested as a child, “Steal Away”—into 40 transcendent minutes, each chord and variation played with an uplifting tenderness, a faith that the world can still rise. Rooted in centuries of suffering, the pieces turned to the future with a soft but defiant smile. At Big Ears 2027, Myers plays organ and piano alongside acclaimed multi-instrumentalist Jerome Harris and drummer Reggie Nicholson, himself a member of the influential AACM universe.